Unless I’m misinterpreting what I’m seeing Microsoft have basically broken copy and paste on macOS.
I have to suffer Office apps for work, but this intolerable!
Copying text from a word document puts nothing in the clipboard (according to Finder). I’ve had to layer windows and drag content into and out of Office applications, and this is unique to MS Office so it’s not the system clipboard or any other app misbehaving.
How can they do this? More importantly how can I fix it?
Update, Word then subsequently crashed.
On reopening (ignoring the tone deaf “Welcome Back” banner) I scrolled down, confirmed my last save worked and then tried copy and paste again.
It works as it should. At least in Word.
Maybe Microsoft should actually hire some staff for software quality control.
Thank you for posting this @Derek. I’ve experienced the same thing with copying and pasting from and into Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Most of the time, if I use the menu bar and choose copy and paste, it works. There are times, however, that I have to completely close Word, etc. and try again. I have seen the same behavior on three different Macs over the last year. I hope someone shares a suggestion here. Just curious, are you using the apps from the Mac App Store? Or, downloading from Microsoft? I believe the challenge started for us after switching to the App Store apps.
I haven’t had this problem (touch wood, cross fingers). What I have noticed, however, is if I select some text and copy, then select some other text to be replaced with the previously copied text, the second copied text (that I want to replace) is now in the paste window.
Very annoying.
I’ve resorted to using the multiple listing clipboard in Launchbar to get around this.
I know this thread is a bit old, but I think I finally found the answer to the challenge. There is a “feature” in office labelled “smart copy and paste” that can be turned off. It is under the Preferences in the application and under Edit. When I unchecked “Use smart cut and paste” I stopped having challenges with copying, cutting, and pasting. I agree with you @Derek that Microsoft needs to do some additional quality control. It works in one build then breaks in another. Happy cutting and pasting…
Thanks. I’ll try that. My recollection is turning that off and on and finding not difference in the behaviour but I’ll have another look at it.